There is no such thing as a pregnant man rules Arizona judge in Thomas Beatie case

March 30, 2013

Same-Sex partners: Nancy with Thomas Beatie, mother of three.

There is no such thing as a pregnant man, ruled Judge Douglas Gerlach in Arizona court today. The judge rejected female “Pregnant Man” Thomas Beatie’s petition for divorce from her wife on the grounds that their marriage was a same-sex marriage, regardless of Beatie’s transgender legal status as “male”. Same-sex marriages are not recognized in the state of Arizona.

Thomas Beatie, 38, was a lesbian named Tracy Lehuanani Lagondino living in the state of Hawaii when she underwent surgical breast removal and began testosterone injections to masculinize herself cosmetically. Tracy had been a model and teenaged beauty queen with a strong belief in sex-based personality theory. There is no national criteria for changing legal sex in the United States and each state determines its own legal criteria. The state of Hawaii allowed her to change her birth certificate from female to male based on a note from her doctor that she had undergone cosmetic breast removal and synthetic hormone injections.

In 2003 Beatie married another woman, Nancy, and after stopping her testosterone injections, gave birth to three children via sperm purchased over the internet. In 2008 Beatie made headlines as “The First Pregnant Man”, appearing on the Oprah Winfrey show and selling her story to tabloids worldwide. The couple moved to Arizona.

Last March Beatie filed for divorce and began selling videos of her wife to tabloids – videos in which Nancy appeared to be intoxicated. Thomas claimed in her divorce papers that Nancy had punched her “in the crotch”, a charge that Nancy denied. The divorce proceedings were delayed because Maricopa County Family Court Judge Douglas Gerlach was unable to find a legal precedent or authority that defined a male as an individual capable of giving birth.

The judge issued a separate ruling disolving the same-sex union and outlining child custody arrangements and child support. Nancy Beatie has stated that she is pleased with the result. Thomas Beatie and her attorneys will conduct a news conference about the ruling next week.

God i was so pissed off when i saw it on oprah, i was like 10 or something.
And i was like “WOW! A PREGNANT MAN, HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE!” and it was all bullshit said in the show that it was a female performing as a dude, and i just got so pissed.

Could the legal tide possibly be turning? The narcissism of this woman pretending to be a man becomes more obvious with reading that she had been a “model and teenaged beauty queen.” The myth that most of these women who so worship maleness are Butch is clearly not true. She certainly has managed to get the fame she was craving though.

Thomas Beatie was a bit of a wake-up call for me, ahead of the Cotton Ceiling debacle. Thomas of course shows the power of biological sex, which as you can see couldn’t give a toss about “gender” and continues to allow a female with a mastectomy, male hormones and a self-determined male identity to continue to be capable of getting pregnant.

Male and female are biological realities. Our use of pronouns is and has always been, sorry gender activists, entirely based on what someone has between their legs, not between their ears. If you want liberation from a prescriptive system that says females do x and males do y then pregnant men and women with penises aren’t going to help smash this gender nonsense down.

@Mikhail- Stop demanding that women lie and use fake pronouns you racist asshole. Women are not required to use fake pronouns or titles in deference to the belief systems of others. Fake pronouns are harmful to women. But you don’t care about that do you. Of course not.

– you appear to have assumed that I do not belong to a particular race (on zero evidence) in suggesting what I would “call” people.

– in doing so frankly you have made yourself sound racist, as Gallus noted. “Objectively of that race” next to that word you used quite frankly makes me ill. Please don’t associate my thoughts with whatever offensive words go through your own mind.

– in attempting to make a point about sex and transsexualism, you have invoked a race-based argument. Why? Because, despite the fact it is not the same point at all (and you know it), you know that it is more emotive, and that any argument you could make based on what is actually at stake here, i.e. biological sex, isn’t really that strong.

I was just reading an article about transgender coopting ‘two spirit’ Native American identities, and that those cultures that were accepting of women in power and far more egalitarian, did not have ‘two spirit’ people, because the roles for both males and females were expansive and wide, and they could do MANY things, and have many responsibilities not limited by sex. Those cultures that did have ‘two spirit’ people, these folks existed because men who couldn’t make it as traditional more macho men, had a category where they were put in the women’s camp and given lesser status, and the women who went on war or hunting parties still had less status than the biological males. It was cultures where male and female roles were far more stratified and separated and male dominated where the ‘two spirit’ came in, still under and ‘less than’ the status of the macho men.

No, men cannot get pregnant and have babies period. Females cannot impregnate(except with a turkey baster maybe, but it won’t come from her body). So it’s all another smokescreen screwy nonsense….and Thomas Beattie was not the first one to do this. Matt Rice was. Insanity….
-FeistyAmazon

I’m interested in idea of “two spirit” and “third gender” lately, as I’ve read lots of comments about people (read: white people) appropriating those identities lately, usually coming from trans* people who are from or identify with cultures that did have this “in between space.”

Some books on feminist ideas by Ueno Chizuko （上野千鶴子）talk about this “third gender” idea, and she points out that when you look at it historically it’s pretty much always (or vast majority of the time?) male-bodied people who end up occupying that space. It’s men who adopt some of the women’s roles and thus are grouped with women in some situations (and some of those people then socialize with women and men, while everyone else is more or less kept separated). There’s an accepted “third category” in many places for gay men who present stereotypically “feminine” way with “feminine behavior,” and in fact “regular” men can have sexual relations with them and not themselves be classed as “gay.” That kind of third category is thus a combination of orientation and presentation. But the reverse, women presenting as men, just isn’t really a “thing” or if it is lately, it’s far more new and just the usual “trans*” that is more worldwide.

Anyway, just had me thinking, how the hierarchy (as opposed to binary) is so much in there.

Thomas Beattie just annoyed me (or more precisely, the news coverage of Thomas Beattie annoyed me) for the stupid incredulity of it. “A man has a baby!” okay yeah I’m going to read that, because that would be just something overturning all of science if natural and some “why?” medical advance if a (necessarily ectopic!) pregnancy was implanted in a man, but no, turns out it’s just a woman who has changed outward appearance to a man. Someone born female with working versions of all the usual parts gets pregnant, that is NOT NEWS. I expected the articles to say “ah well of course, that’s the trick, okay, you must get strange looks though!” but no, they continued to act as if this was some wow groundbreaking thing.

I think there hasn’t been much push-back against this kind of co-optation (or, rather, retconning) because there’s believed to be no cost: if crackers want to think indigenous peoples were politically correct since the dawn of time, ok, whatever, the only offensive part of that is the assumption of a mono-culture.

But it’s really not any different than euro dudes thinking Joan of Arc must have had a second spirit (the Holy!) to do anything against her nature as a female.

It does open the door to some questions, especially when it comes to many creation stories:

“So, did Sky Woman have a swinging cock or not, how do we know she wasn’t two spirited? Wait: You’re saying she was female, absolutely? Bigot! Essentialist!”

But that’s not a door genderists have had to walk through yet, afaik, though I’m probably unfortunately wrong on that. I can imagine someone taking up that mantle the same way that the dudes did a dude only Vagina Monologues performance.

It is interesting that the noble scholars of wikipedia have an extended bibliography on the subject but don’t name a single so-called two-spirited person who did anything worth a damn prior to 1990. That’s a group worth being part of! Such a noble heritage!

As soon as I read “two spirit” my eyes begin to droop. It is just another way of saying what has been said already a 1000 times. Gender is a construct. Gender is performed. Performance is switched, played with, interchanged………… I first read it in Native American literature. I am sure it was some hatched concept to make an exception of one woman while keeping women as a whole in their place. “That woman there is okay to advise us because she is really a he, at least right now, she is.”

Certainly the modern version of it, yeah, seems that way. Interestingly enough there’s tension between native/indigenous people who use it as shorthand for “native/indigenous and gay” (in the usual sense of gay, and purposely adopted in recent times for that use) and various trans* people (both native/indigenous and not) who want to say it has some deeper trans* related meaning.

Still though it seems even in the claims to historical times, there’s a space for basically MTF, but not so much the reverse. I think the hierarchical nature of gender (which I 100% agree is constructed) factors into that, and that imbalance gets glossed over a lot of the time.

No only that but any woman who lost her breasts from say, cancer, would automatically become male. And any males who grew enough breast tissue (it’s getting more and more common; note that men are capable of lactating normally, and the only difference between their ‘pectorals’ is that they have less fat on average), would then become women!

Even as FTM I don’t like seeing Thomas in the news… I am a trans man but the thought of getting pregnant would make me sick. I don’t think men should get pregnant. Also wondering why he didn’t let his girlfriend get pregnant. This makes all trans people look bad… and of course it’s also a person who has ruined a relationship.

I do not believe all females are male. FTM can be a man, but a body can never be entirely changed, I do not deny reality… I know I lack a prostate etc. and the surgeries aren’t perfect (but they’re getting there). However… as a transsexual, I can not imagine why one who has gone through the process to become man (male-bodied) would want to become pregnant.

The whole prospect of actually being capable of bearing a child disturbs me because bearing children is not for men, unless you’re a seahorse or something. Trans men strive for a body that is as male as is possible, where does becoming pregnant fit into that? This is just my personal opinion… and an opinion shouldn’t change legislature😉

I am also against being able to change your legal sex if you do not wish to continue past hormone treatment (except if you can’t due to financial reasons etc), or if you aren’t actually transitioning. I agree with many radical feminists that the trans community goes too far with “convincing” people to transition and I’m currently writing a simple article on sexism in the trans community.

“Female males” don’t make all trans people look bad, it’s just the ones which are featured in the media. The people who get all the media attention are the ones who are always in bad situations. People assume all trans people are like that. The media introduced trans men (and transgender people in general) through a pregnant man who is in divorce and has sold videos of his wife… which, as you might imagine, is not a good way to gain tolerance/acceptance. Most trans people on tv are like the most outlandish, socially-inept persons they could find. That is what I meant.

If I didn’t transition, I think my life would be much easier as a woman… but I’m not sure if I would still be alive.

Some years ago I went to a large San Francisco conference supposedly to bridge the gap between F2Ts and Butches, back when the myth that most F2Ts were Butch. I found it to be an incredibly Butch-hating gang-up with F2Ts and M2Ts and het and bisexual women all making Butch-hating and female-hating comments against the Butches. Even then, one of the women who had groupies was declaring how she was the most queer because she was a gay man. Her followers were quite feminine young women who described themselves as “bois.”

But one of the most painful parts was a very oppressed woman (oppressed by racism and classism) saying how when she’d told her friends and lover about hating her female body (she’d been raped and objectified with large breasts), she was told she should get pregnant to learn to love her body. She did and became suicidal. So then she was told maybe she was really a man and should “transition.”

Not once, except for my close friend and I, did anyone talk about why of course women, and especially Butches who have always refused male-identified “femininity,” would not feel safe or happy looking the way women are pressured to look in patriarchy, or how men hating and assaulting and objectifying us since we were little girls would affect how we feel. In other words, not even basic feminism was discussed.

Apparently Beatie is also a stalker. We’re constantly told that trans people are perfectly healthy except for being born with the wrong genitals. (Wait, did I say “born with the wrong genitals”? How 20th century of me! I meant “assigned to the wrong gender at birth”!)

But again and again, we find that the poster children for this movement have serious mental issues – even before the FtTs start drugging themselves with testosterone.